You don’t expect to talk Chinatown with Edward Burtynsky and Jennifer Baichwal.

The dynamic documentary duo responsible for Manufactured Landscapes may have a proven touch for all things industrial, cinematic and Asian, but the classic Polanski neo-noir thriller starring Jack Nicholson as a Los Angeles gumshoe seems a little off-topic — until you talk about theme and plot.

In addition to being a taboo-plagued love story, Chinatown was all about the early development of Los Angeles and the drive to bring water to the desert. Baichwal and Burtynsky’s latest effort taps the very same source.

Watermark is a feature-length piece of cinematic impressionism. Shot in several countries over the course of three years, the new Baichwal-Burtynsky film takes a detailed look at the complicated relationship between human beings and the fluid that surrounds us from the moment of conception.

Burtynsky says he had just finished his fine art photography book about oil when the idea for water hit him like a tidal wave. He was in Australia working in tandem with National Geographic when he was inundated with stories of drought.

“They were suffering through a decade of drought,” he says.

“Water. Water. Water. That’s all they were talking about. And to me, that really felt like foreshadowing: It suggests what would happen in the Southwest United States, or places in China and India where climate change is drying things up.

“I figured I’d done a project as big as oil, maybe I could scope out a project with water,” Burtynsky says.

Baichwal says she’d wanted to work with the Toronto-based camera star again ever since they wrapped the award-winning Manufactured Landscapes in 2006, but she got waylaid on Payback — her recent documentary based on Margaret Atwood’s Massey Lectures and resulting book — while Burtynsky was knee deep in his crude art project.

“When Ed came back from California with his first set of aerial pictures, we knew we had endless possibilities for a movie,” says Baichwal, referring to Burtynsky’s otherworldly images of an irrigated desert from the air.

“You think water: It’s too huge a topic,” Burtynsky says.

“It’s too big to get your head around,” Baichwal says.

“This is about a massive subject, and the only way we can make this work filmically is by creating something that is almost like water, something that has a flow and a rhythm.”

Baichwal says there are no “stories” in the film, even though she uses the word to describe the series of “vignettes” that comprise the running-time.

“They are existential moments. They have no arcs. They are little jewels of moments, but within them is this dialectic of the macro and micro view. Starting from the air with the macro, because Ed realized we needed to be high,” Baichwal says.

“Then getting down on the ground, and mapping the route of water on the ground, and how it’s used on Earth.”

Baichwal describes one shoot in ancient rice paddies. “(Cinematographer Nick de Pencier) and I were standing there knee deep when we see this guy in a crazy pink cap … and we decided to follow him.”

The fellow in the rose chapeau explained how the stream is divided among the rice farmers who use an ancient piece of timber, carved with notches, to serve as a mini-dam and channel diverter.

“We had to do that with every story,” Baichwal says. “We had to find the relationship between the water and the people in every situation we looked at. It’s always there.

One of the chosen locales is the Xiluodu dam project in China, another monolithic structure redefining the Asian landscape. Everything about the dam dwarfs the human form, yet the massive walls of concrete are entirely man-made.

It’s an odd, somewhat absurd, dynamic, but it pulls all the floating ideas within the documentary together.

“There are all these contrasts between the large and small, the micro and macro view, east and west, wet and dry,” Burtynsky says. “Every time we pointed the camera, the relationships would slowly reveal themselves.”

Baichwal says her job as the film director was to make sure those binaries articulated something cinematically, mostly through juxtaposition and chiselling out the visual conflicts.

“We’re not looking to be preachy … but when you walk into a landscape like the Colorado River estuary, a place that used to be 5,000 square miles of lush wetlands but is now an arid desert where boats sit on dry sand, the reality of the transformation hits you.”

It’s in the cracks of the sun-baked mud that memories of Chinatown slap you across the face, Baichwal says, because Polanski’s movie was about getting water to Los Angeles without any concern about the consequences.

“There are 1,800 agencies dedicated to water in California alone,” Burtynsky says. “It’s been redirected in so many different ways, and our movie says that every time you redirect the water, there is a winner and a loser. There is an effect.”

Generally speaking, that effect is negative, but the filmmakers say they didn’t want to make Watermark a “downer” documentary.

“The first time we screened Manufactured Landscapes with an audience, I realized it was a downer,” Baichwal says.

“Yeah. It was like ‘When can I slash my wrists?’ ” Burtynsky says.

“We didn’t want to make this a downer, so we went to a pristine watershed right in our own backyard. We went to the Stikine, the sacred headwaters of the river in Northern B.C., and it was a revelation. It’s so beautiful … you can’t imagine how anyone could see it as just a resource. It’s alive. To see water before it’s changed by man is a revelation,” she says.

“And the best thing is, it comes back. You can change water’s course, but if you leave it alone, it will bounce back pretty quickly. Even the Colorado River estuary would come back if the all-American aqueduct were stopped tomorrow.”

But then there would be no California, or no Chinatown. Or for that matter, no Watermark.

Capsule review: Watermark

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky, the filmmakers behind Manufactured Landscapes, return with a new documentary in a similar vein. This time, the seasoned documentary director and Toronto-based art photographer focus their joint lens on water — the ubiquitous, life-giving element we generally take for granted. Without a single speech about the real face of climate change, Watermark still articulates a comprehensive argument about the undeniable toll of mass consumerism as it flies us around the world and shows how water has been redirected to meet insatiable human needs, often leaving lifeless deserts behind. Because the images are so unfathomably gorgeous, and so weirdly surreal, Watermark leaves a ghostly impression that will no doubt prove haunting.

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